Man, this topic hits close to home. I've always been dysphoric about my downstairs mix-up, but I didn't know how bad until recently. You see, when I was fresh out of high school, I realized that my feelings of being off or wrongly embodied were because I was transgender. When I looked up bottom surgeries after much deliberation, I was so disappointed by what the internet image search yielded that I made the decision to try to live as a woman and be happy with it. So I started to repress everything. All of it. But as many will tell you, repression is not how you fix things and it ain't exactly a healthy thing either.
Five or more years later I decided to come out when I realized I just couldn't live my life like that anymore, and I was tired of putting on a mask everyday. I sincerely did try though; no one could say I didn't.
After I came out, I was still repressing my feelings and dysphoria so that I wouldn't have to hurt. I'd seen so many other guys hurting over it, and I'd had quite enough of that noise in my life. I thought I could ignore it, but just like with repressing my true self, it was a BIG MISTAKE. It just piled up and piled up like an ignored dirty laundry basket, and eventually the load overflows. Here recently with the help of my therapist, I've been allowing myself to explore and feel, rather than repress and conceal. I have found recently where once I was sure I could transition and leave my naughty-bits alone, that it may not be good enough for me. I don't know what I'm going to do, how, how far to take it, or how much it'll run me. I just know that what I thought was once a cold, distant acceptance of my genitals was actually seething dysphoria just waiting for the box to be opened. And man, did Pandora rip it open like a kid on Christmas.
